Relax, Facebook's Passive News Sharing Isn't a Privacy Nightmare

Jeff Bercovici
,
Forbes Staff
I cover technology with an emphasis on social and digital media.

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If there's confusion about that, it's because, in their F8 presentations, Facebook executives made it sound as though passive sharing is an mandatory feature of the new apps. Naturally they're not going to emphasize the opt-out option because it's not how they want you to behave. It interferes with their plan to supersize user engagement through socially-powered discovery. But that's their problem, not yours.

Update: Okay, so maybe there's also confusion because it's actually just sort of confusing. A Washington Post spokeswoman explains the nuances of privacy in the Social Reader app this way:

If you have your privacy setting in Facebook on "only me," then what you read within the app will not go to Timeline or be seen by friends outside of the app. However, inside the app friends who have also downloaded Social Reader will be able to see what you've read unless you mark the article as unread.

By the way, the Wall Street Journal's new Facebook app, WSJ Social, does not make use of passive sharing. Your friends and followers only see articles that you choose to share, not just the ones you read. But that's more a function of timing than a matter of principle, explains a spokeswoman:

We developed WSJ Social over the summer using existing functionality because we wanted to move quickly. Now that WSJ Social is released, we’ll look into what more Facebook has made available to publishers and how it could work for WSJ Social. It’s an open question for us at this point simply because we’re only now getting a closer look at Facebook's new capabilities.